There are villages along the Turkish coast kept alive only by annual visits from zealous Australians and New Zealanders. These villages consist of one main street along the waterline where dogs and cats stray and a ferry leaves every morning, crossing the ancient waters of the Dardanelles. These are villages with hotels where electricity only works on one side of the room and the windows don’t shut properly so the sleeping inhabitants are roused by cold air at six AM every morning when the call to prayer twists like an almost tangible string of smoke, winding from the spires of the mosque down the street and through the air, permeating the sleepy cottages and the chicken sheds and the schools and bakeries and grocery stores. Permeating the crumbling walls and scrubby bushes. These are villages neither good nor bad neither third nor first world, nor really of this world at all, not when some peoples’’ whole worlds are marked by and made of backyards. This is not worse nor is it better but it is different to clotheslines (not mentioning the quintessential hillshoist, except to say that once my father tied a basket to ours by a rope and spun me in circles on a summer day) and it is different to nature strips and things are different everywhere, and the only reason these villages are not overrun by the dogs that prance the main street are boatloads of “brave young men” from our backyards and hillshoists and nature strips
This is okay.
This is okay.
And yet and yet, I heard a woman say that this is all kind of third world and I could hear the curled nose in her voice, I could hear the shrugged shoulders and I could see in my mind’s eye children in back streets with cobblestones and dry bushes and I could see them playing on pebbly beaches and I remembered the boys climbing grassy mounds that disguised the Turkish tanks that ripped into our boats and ripped into our “brave young men” and I see every world.
Some people come here to fashion someone’s not-knowing uninformed illiterate and heartbreaking death into something to hold, tangible. A place to visit and a heart to beat. So we beat it along the Turkish coast in the villages with the dogs on the main street and the men drinking red tea and black coffee and the mosques with speakers attached halfway up the minarets and we beat it into our minds and our lives because we’re too young to have anything happen naturally. And nothing is more beautiful than walking from the dawn service to the lone pine even though we don’t belong here and even though there were a million things and bravery is three quarters of the way down the list. There was sadness and there are eighteen year olds whose gravestones read “peace”.
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